Assassinphone threat to US armed forces

[Baffo 32]

sounds like one of many ways in which this (blowback) is developing, of
powers exposing signals and systems to attack while reliance on them builds.

even deeper into being on topic of this list: this might have not happened
if surveillance had developed in a consensual, democratic manner, as then
for example we might have phones that had anonymous emissions unless
unlocked via jury or such.

i think i found the article at
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/22/ukraine-war-pentagon-lessons-learned/
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/22/ukraine-war-pentagon-lessons-learned/#>
.
a brief skim it describes a developing electronic arms race maybe in
previously less-engaged frontiers

i’m pasting it below because, despite a focus on tactics for the use of
weaponry, i think it reveals something important regarding potential future
electronic spaces in general.. maybe i am wrong. sorry for the poor quality
of the paste.

What the Pentagon has learned from two years of war in Ukraine
With hundreds of thousands dead or wounded and still no end in sight, the
conflict has revealed that U.S. battlefield calculations must evolve
By Alex Horton
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/people/alex-horton/?utm_term=.c77831808f32?itid=ai_top_hortona>
February 22, 2024 at 5:00 a.m. EST
A soldier with the 1st Armored Division in the field at the Army's National
Training Center at Fort Irwin, Calif., on Jan 20. (Eric Thayer/for The
Washington Post)
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FORT IRWIN, Calif. — As the general paced the briefing room, he displayed a
piece of lethal technology and detailed the death and chaos it has caused
in Ukraine.

Almost 90 Russian soldiers were slain in a single attack in 2022,explained
Army Maj. Gen. Curtis Taylor, when Ukrainian forces dropped U.S.-provided
rockets
<https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/02/ukraine-strike-russian-held-makiivka-reportedly-kills-troops>
 on buildings pulsing with electronic signals.

Here in the Mojave Desert, where Taylor oversees simulated war designed to
prepare U.S. troops for the real thing, the same behavior abounds, he
warned.

Taylor held up his cellphone. “This device,” he said, “is going to get our
soldiers killed.”

The U.S. military is undertaking an expansive revision of its approach to
war fighting, having largely abandoned the counterinsurgency playbook that
was a hallmark of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan to focus instead on
preparing for an even larger conflict with more sophisticated adversaries
such as Russia or China.

What’s transpired in Ukraine, where this week the war enters its third year
with hundreds of thousands dead or wounded on both sides and still no end
in sight, has made clear to the Pentagon that battlefield calculations have
fundamentally changed in the years since it last deployed forces in large
numbers. Precision weapons, fleets of drones and digital surveillance can
reach far beyond the front lines, posing grave risk to personnel wherever
they are.

The war remains an active and bountiful research opportunity for American
military planners as they look to the future, officials say. A classified
year-long study on the lessons learned from both sides of the bloody
campaign will help inform the next National Defense Strategy, a sweeping
document that aligns the Pentagon’s myriad priorities. The 20 officers who
led the project examined five areas: ground maneuver, air power,
information warfare, sustaining and growing forces and long range fire
capability.

“We immersed them in this conflict to make sure they were really
understanding the implications for warfare,” said a senior defense
official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the initiative.

The “character of war” is changing, another official said, and the lessons
taken from Ukraine stand to be “an enduring resource.”
Camouflage netting in the field at the National Training Center. Soldiers
are getting back to fundamentals like concealment. (Eric Thayer/for The
Washington Post)
Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy A. George, center, tours the Army National
Training Center on Jan. 20. (Eric Thayer/for The Washington Post)
A soldier holds an M4 rifle. (Eric Thayer/for The Washington Post)

The Ukraine conflict has challenged core assumptions. The war has become an
attritional slugfest with each side attempting to wear down the other, a
model thought to be anachronistic, said Stacie Pettyjohn, director of the
defense program at the Center for a New American Security, a think tank.

It also has complicated a long-held belief in the Pentagon that expensive
precision weapons are central to winning America’s conflicts, Pettyjohn
said. GPS-guided munitions provided to Ukraine have proven vulnerable to
electronic jamming. Its military has adapted by pairing older unguided
artillery with sensors and drones, which can be used to spot targets and
refine their shots. U.S. military commanders have almost certainly taken
notice, she said.
A helicopter flies over the horizon at the National Training Center. (Eric
Thayer/for The Washington Post)
‘The new cigarette in the foxhole’

Ukraine has demonstrated that everything U.S. troops do in the field — from
planning missions and patrolling to the technology that enables virtually
every military task — needs to be rethought, officials say.

Fort Irwin is home to the National Training Center, or NTC, one of two Army
ranges in the United States where troops refine tactics and prepare for
deployments. The training area, known to soldiers as “The Box,” is a patch
of desert about the size of Rhode Island.

In years past, the facility replicated what U.S. forces could expect to
face in Iraq and Afghanistan. Now trench lines zigzag across positions
intended to replicate the battlespace in Ukraine.

Over the winter, the facility was occupied by the 1st Armored Division. As
soldiers fought simulated battles, Taylor, the commanding general here,
explained Ukraine’s transformational imprint on how the Army thinks and
trains for combat. “Russian artillery has rendered maneuver difficult and
command posts unsurvivable,” one of his briefing slides noted.

Vitally, commanders warn over and over that most electronic gear is a
potential target. Soldiers are instructed to not use their phones in the
training area, and observers, known as OCs, carry handheld detectors trying
to sniff out any contraband.
Soldiers with the 1st Armored Division participate in training with their
tactical vehicles. (Eric Thayer/for The Washington Post)
A simulated village shown from a helicopter at the National Training
Center. (Eric Thayer/for The Washington Post)
A soldier in training. (Eric Thayer/for The Washington Post)

Taylor told the story of an Apache helicopter pilot who successfully
avoided air defense systems during a simulated attack. Personnel portraying
the enemy forces were unable to determine the path the helicopter took, but
after examining commercially available cellphone data, they were able to
map the journey of a device traveling across the desert at 120 miles per
hour. It revealed where the Apache flew to evade the defenses.

The general is adamant about stamping out such behaviors. He likens the
threat to that posed by cigarette smoking on the front lines during World
War II, when enemy forces looked for bright orange flickers to help
identify their targets.

“I think our addiction to cellphones is equally as threatening,” Taylor
said. “This is the new cigarette in the foxhole.”

Troops also have to consider the cellphone use occurring around them.
Personnel tasked with portraying noncombatants capture photos and videos of
troop locations and equipment, and upload the imagery to a mock social
network called Fakebook. There, it populates in a feed used by service
members playing the part of enemy forces who then use that data to attack.

Radios, drone controllers and vehicles all produce substantial amounts of
electromagnetic activity and thermal energy that can be detected. To
confuse enemy surveillance, the Army is teaching soldiers to hide in plain
sight.
Ukrainian army soldier Dasha, 22, checks her phone after a military sweep
to search for possible remnants of Russian troops after their withdrawal
from villages in the outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Friday, April 1, 2022. (AP
Photo/Rodrigo Abd)

The troops are learning, leaders said. But a walk around The Box showed
room for improvement. The division’s command post, essentially a folding
table with four Humvees parked around it, was draped in camouflage netting
that helps dampen electronic and thermal signatures. The post was hidden
well — except for the bright white Starlink satellite internet terminal
placed outside.
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The netting interfered with its signal, a soldier explained. It risked
standing out to drones or surveillance aircraft, Taylor told them. “Put a
blanket on that,” he advised.
Threats from above

The Russian and Ukrainian militaries each flood the sky with one-way attack
drones that are inexpensive and able to skirt detection. Their prolific use
has forced American military leaders to consider where there are gaps in
their capabilities.

Whereas recent U.S. conflicts featured big, expensive drones employed for
missions orchestrated at very senior levels of command, in Ukraine leaders
have put powerful surveillance and attack capabilities in the hands of
individual soldiers
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/04/fpv-drone-ukraine-russia/?itid=lk_inline_manual_37>
—
a degree of autonomy for small units that the U.S. military is only
recently trying to emulate
<https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3657609/defense-innovation-official-says-replicator-initiative-remains-on-track/>
.

The technology’s proliferation has also created a new urgency at the
Pentagon to develop and field better counter-drone systems. In Jordan last
month, three U.S. soldiers were killed after a one-way drone, which
officials have said likely went undetected
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2024/02/06/drone-jordan-attack/?itid=lk_inline_manual_38>,
crashed into their living quarters.
Victor Stelmakh, the head of an attack drone unit in the 68th Jaeger
Brigade, pilots a first-person view attack drone in the Luhansk region on
Sept. 1. (Heidi Levine/for The Washington Post)
A Ukrainian FPV drone with an improvised warhead flies toward a Russian
position in southern Ukraine on Sept. 14. (Wojciech Grzedzinski/For The
Washington Post)

The Army, taking cues from the Ukraine war, has begun experimenting
with dropping
small munitions from drones
<https://taskandpurpose.com/news/fort-liberty-drones-munitions/>, a tactic
used by the Islamic State that has since become a mainstay in Ukraine. It
also has made a decision to do away with two surveillance drone platforms,
the Shadow and Raven, describing them as unable to survive in modern
conflict.

“We are learning from the battlefield — especially in Ukraine — that aerial
reconnaissance has fundamentally changed,” Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy
George said.

The Ukrainians have discovered some innovative solutions to detect drones,
Gen. James B. Hecker, the chief of Air Force operations in Europe and
Africa, said during a recent symposium.

He told the story of two Ukrainians who collected thousands of smartphones,
affixed microphones and connected them to a network capable of detecting
the unique buzzing sound of approaching unmanned systems. The information
then gets relayed to air defense soldiers who can take action. The effort
was briefed to the Pentagon’s Missile Defense Agency and referred to NATO
and U.S. commands to potentially duplicate, Hecker said.

Hecker also described recent drone and missile attacks targeting merchant
and military ships in the Red Sea. The violence by militants in Yemen has
been met with an aggressive response by the United States. Gesturing to his
counterpart responsible for defending against potential threats from China,
he said that “What the Houthis did, what Russia is doing, is nothing
compared to what we’re going to see in your theater.”
A Ukrainian serviceman walks amid destroyed Russian tanks in Bucha, on the
outskirts of Kyiv, Ukraine, Wednesday, April 6, 2022. (AP Photo/Felipe Dana)
The pace of change

In the woods at Fort Johnson, an Army post in western Louisiana, American
troops inspired by the lessons of Ukraine have a motto: Dig or die.

Soldiers who rotate through the Joint Readiness Training Center there are
learning to create trenches and dugouts, relics of past conflicts brought
back to provide protection from bombs and drones. At one position, soldiers
scooped up handfuls of sticks and brush to better conceal their foxholes,
saying they put shovel to earth for hours in preparation.

“I hope they come,” one said. “I didn’t dig this for no reason.”

Personnel playing the role of opposing forces used AI software and cheap
drones to throw their compatriots off balance, then showed them what they
uncovered to help them improve.
A soldier in a command post shows an app on a smartphone that helps forces
stay in constant communication at the Joint Readiness Training Center at
Fort Johnson, La., on Jan. 22. (Alex Horton/The Washington Post)
Soldiers use sticks and leaves to conceal a fighting position at the Joint
Readiness Training Center. The war in Ukraine has reemphasized the
importance of camouflage for soldiers on the ground. (Alex Horton/The
Washington Post)

Although troops are getting better at physical camouflage, their digital
trail is still a vulnerability. One drone used by opposing forces at Fort
Johnson is capable of detecting WiFi signals and Bluetooth-enabled devices,
an officer noted.

In another case, a command post was identified through its network name:
“command post.”

While the Ukraine war has pushed battlefield innovation, some observers
surmise the Pentagon will move only so quickly without forces in extremis.

There are plenty of signs that the legacy of the post-9/11 wars, which
shaped the careers and experience of today’s military leaders, still looms
large. U.S. forces remain under threat in the Middle East, and troops there
are still assigned to — and attacked at
<https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2023/11/19/iranian-proxy-attacks-us-troops/?itid=lk_inline_manual_59>
—
the same bases their predecessors occupied years ago.

At Fort Johnson, the new soldier in-processing center has three digital
clocks on the wall. One displays the local hour. The others flash the time
in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Pettyjohn, with the Center for New American Security, acknowledged that the
U.S. and Ukrainian militaries operate differently, meaning some takeaways
from the war with Russia may not be applicable.

But she noted that some American military leaders she has spoken to have
seemed circumspect that there’s much for them learn. They underestimate,
she said, how the nature of fighting has changed, holding tight to the
risky assumption that the United States would simply do better in similar
circumstances.
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